


my star is fading

by Godtiss



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, mentions of drug abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-12
Updated: 2013-06-12
Packaged: 2017-12-14 18:22:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/839933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Godtiss/pseuds/Godtiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He forgets gradually, but not entirely. Sherlock knows he will dream of John until the day he too falls asleep and does not wake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my star is fading

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Amsterdam by Coldplay

John Watson dies on a cold Saturday in October.

There is no explosion, no crack of gunfire or squealing of tires. No final heroic act or confessions whispered with last breaths to anyone willing to listen.

The cancer takes him slowly, going against everything that John Watson was and that alone makes it worse.

Sherlock isn’t with him when it happens. Dragged back to Baker Street by Lestrade with orders to sleep and eat, while John takes a turn for the worst in the night. He’s gone by morning, just before the first wisps of dawn begin to creep over the rooftops of London.

Mycroft is sitting in the hospital lobby when Sherlock returns. The site of his brother, sans umbrella and impeccable grooming, sends the detective spinning on his heels and dashing back out the automatic doors.

He disappears for four days. Not even Mycroft, with his CCTV and every facial recognition software he’s afforded, can find the younger Holmes until he turns up, eyes hollow and cheeks pale, at the funeral.

They offer to let him speak, but his gaze remains fixed on the coffin and his lips remain pressed shut. 

John would’ve wanted to be cremated, he wants to say. He wants to shout at them all that they’re destroying John’s memory by sending him down into the earth, stationary to decay, when he could’ve been set on the wind to be swept up and carried away to all the places he loved.

Sentiment, he thinks.

But he says nothing, statuesque as John’s mourners begin to trickle away. They give him a wide berth as they go, eyes averted from the stoic detective lingering at the edge of the grave.

He remembers a time, eight years ago, when he watched John do the same at Sherlock’s own grave. Back when the only danger came in the form of bullets and knives, of murderers and psychopaths and not the silent betrayal of their own bodies. Back when Sherlock had died on a Tuesday in February, disgraced and desperate to save John’s life.

He realizes now there is no such thing as saving a life. The best you can do is prolong it, and even then you’re playing a game of chance where the odds are stacked against you.

Lestrade is last to leave. Sherlock feels a hand on his shoulder as the man passes, brave enough to step into his space. He inclines his head, in acknowledgment but not in thanks, because he doesn’t need anyone’s pity and he thinks Lestrade understands when Sherlock sees him turn and go.

He stays by the grave until dusk begins to fall. He’s never been one for grand confessions or dramatic gestures – well, perhaps in his youth, but John wouldn’t have expected it nor, Sherlock thinks, would it have been appreciated. So he remains silent and still until the London lights begin to blink on and the sun is dipping below the horizon.

With the coming of night, Sherlock turns and walks away. He knows Mycroft expects him to disappear again, knows Lestrade wouldn’t be surprised if he did. He considers it – thinks of hailing a cab and letting it take him away from the city that still remembers John Watson as he was, where everything is an old case solved or a bullet dodged or a life prolonged.

Instead, he finds himself on the roof of St. Bart’s, shivering in the crisp autumn air as the breeze plucks at his coat with chilled fingers. He sits on the ledge, next to the memory of Moriarty with his disdainful scowl, and looks down at the place where he died.

A door opens somewhere behind him, and he doesn’t need to look to know it’s Molly. 

“I saw you pass by the lab as I was getting ready to leave,” she says as she approaches, footsteps quiet and hesitant, voice caught by the wind. She sits beside him, shoulders nearly brushing. “I thought you might be up here.”

He turns towards her, taking in her sad smile and finding that he doesn’t mind it as much as he thought he would. Molly is not the same person she was before Sherlock’s death – having played as instrumental of a part in it as she did, she’s seen him at his worst and still calls him a friend, and he’ll never understand her for it. 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there today.”

He nods his understanding, because Molly has never handled death well. Perhaps because she knows how cold and stiff the limbs become, or how the illusion of peace is cast upon stilled expressions after even the most violent deaths. She knows how lungs no longer take in air, how blood no longer flows, how hearts no longer beat. She knows all of this because strangers have taught her over the years, under her practiced hand, and she does not need to be reminded by her loved ones.

Sherlock doesn’t blame her. 

John wouldn’t have, either.

“Are you…?” she begins, and he laughs – a hollow, bitter sound.

She ducks her head, shadows catching her cheeks. Sherlock looks away again, out towards the places he and John used to live and breathe and work, where only ghosts remember now.

“I know you don’t want to hear it-“

“Then don’t say it.”

“But you need to hear it from someone.”

She leans her shoulder into his and he can feel her shivering against him. There was a time when he would’ve shied away from the contact, would’ve stood and fled or spit something cruel, intending to hurt. He can’t bring himself to care now, not with her, because he knows she only means the best.

“It’s okay to be sad.”

He breathes, feeling something slowly coming apart deep in his chest, until he can’t bear the pain and turns once more, burying his face in the space where her shoulder meets her neck. She says nothing, merciful in her silence – instead, thin arms wrap around his chest and he finds comfort in the touch.

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, him breathing and her holding. The night steadily grows colder around them, steam rising from between parted lips, until he withdraws enough to shed his coat and drape it around her. She protests, tries to give it back, but he stands and winces the aches out of his stiffened joints before offering her a hand.

She takes it, eyes meeting his in the gloom offered by artificial city lights, and if he ends up asleep on her couch that night because he can’t face returning to the flat that he and John shared, neither of them say anything about it. 

It takes him two days before he can bear to climb the steps leading to 221b Baker Street. There’s one of John’s old cups sitting on the coffee table, a jumper discarded on the back of his chair, a handwritten note taped to the refrigerator reminding Sherlock to take care of himself while he’s in the hospital.

Sherlock breaks then. Shatters completely and totally without the one thing that had tethered him to humanity for so long. He rages, a force of destruction in the flat that spares no sympathy for memories too painful to comprehend. When he is finished, exhausted and dull-eyed, the only things that remain wholly intact are his violin and somehow – miraculously – John’s chair.

He settles himself on the floor, back against the wall below the window overlooking Baker Street, with his violin beneath his chin. He coaxes notes from the instrument – Mendelssohn, John’s favorite - and he isn’t surprised when Mycroft appears in the doorway not long after, taking in the destruction and chaos at his feet without so much as a raised eyebrow, a subtle downward quirk of his lips. 

Sherlock stills his bow, gently lowers it to the ground next to his knee, meets Mycroft’s unreadable gaze equally.

“Come to save me from myself?” he asks, scorn dripping from his words. But Mycroft shakes his head.

“I never had the power to do that,” he admits, and Sherlock is inclined to agree. “It would be futile on my part if I were to try now. I simply wanted to stop in.”

_I worry. Constantly._

He picks his way through the debris and sits on the tattered sofa, umbrella balanced next to him. Sherlock ignores his presence in favor of reassuming his earlier position, beginning to play once more.

Mycroft sits silent and watchful for nearly an hour, an observer to his brother’s specific brand of mourning. He’s never been one to comfort – likely wouldn’t even know where to begin with Sherlock, as if his attempts would even be welcome. He leaves eventually, and Sherlock tracks his movements from the corner of his eye until Mycroft vanishes down the stairs and out into the street.

With gritted teeth to bite off his cry, Sherlock sends his violin shattering against the doorframe.

He gives into temptation, and disappears for five months.

Five months spent in the darkest pits of London, of Europe, where he fades into the shadows and fades into himself. He sharpens his tongue into a razor’s edge and rediscovers the universe with needles and bruises, loses a bit of himself with every day that passes.

He’s not proud. 

It’s nearly three in the morning on a cold Wednesday in March when he finally allows himself to be seen by a security camera he knows Mycroft will be watching. He expects a black car parked on the curb within minutes. What he gets instead is a slightly battered old Volvo, door creaking as it swings open to allow a tired-looking Lestrade to stumble out onto the pavement, shoes scuffing at the concrete.

Sherlock sits in the shadows, leaning against a crumbling wall as he watches the detective inspector draw closer. He’s shivering, almost surprised that Lestrade can’t hear his brittle bones rattling beneath his skin. 

“Sherlock?”

Lestrade kneels. His eyes are wide and dark in the gloom, a worried furrow to his brow. He mutters a quiet curse into the night, one hand reaching out to grasp Sherlock’s bony shoulder, fingers digging into the fraying fabric of his coat.

“Sherlock, can you hear me?”

It takes more effort than it’s likely worth in the end, but Sherlock manages to roll his eyes and offer up a scathing _yes, obviously_ in the form of an exhaled breath. Lestrade huffs the sad approximation of a startled laugh, pulls him forward until Sherlock’s forehead rests against the detective inspector’s chest.

“We need to get you inside somewhere. Out of the cold.”

“No hospital,” Sherlock murmurs, and for a moment he is breathless and shaking with more than the cold because he hasn’t been to a hospital since John-

“No hospital,” Lestrade agrees, and Sherlock thinks he understands. “Can you stand?”

He thinks he can – says as much – and Lestrade helps him to his feet. He sways dangerously, world caught at a tilt, and would’ve fallen had the detective inspector not caught him.

“Easy, Sherlock.”

Together they make it to the car. Sherlock’s forehead smudges grease across the window as he leans against it, eyes half-lidded as he watches London slide by in a blur of pale light. They pass Baker Street. The car does not slow.

Lestrade’s flat has seen better days – Sherlock hazily remembers a time, years ago, barely into his twenties, when he’d taken refuge on the man’s sofa and shaken through the remainders of a withdrawal. Then there had been fewer scratches and chips in the furniture, fewer stains in the carpet, fewer hints towards a man who had lost in love only to himself lacking in most else as well.

Sherlock lets himself be led towards the bedroom. He considers raising a protest, but the breath would be wasted and he’s not in the mood to argue. His body is rebelling at the lack of proper care it has received in the five months prior, sleep weighing heavily on his eyes, hunger gnawing at his organs, hurt crawling its way through his bones. 

He wants to sleep, but he knows as soon as he does, John will be there.

The dreams are rarely the same. There is no pattern to them, at least not that he has been able to discern. Sometimes he is back in 221b and John is sat in his chair, laughing at crap telly, typing away at his computer, listening with rapt attention as Sherlock plays Mendelssohn for him. Sometimes they are out, hovering over a body at the morgue, John rattling off his own medical deductions while Sherlock drinks in the sight of him. Sometimes they are together in the back of a cab, breathless and grinning with eyes lit with adrenaline. 

Sometimes they are in bed, limbs tangled and bodies soft and warm, while John sleeps with his head tucked into the space under Sherlock’s chin, breath ghosting across his shoulder. 

Other times they are at the pool, red dots scattered across John’s form still covered in explosives. John floating face-down in the pool, water slowly fading to red around him. John with a bullet in his shoulder, in his chest, between the eyes.

John on top of St. Bart’s. John falling. John’s blood pooling on the pavement, eyes open and unseeing.

John in the hospital the last night Sherlock saw him, smiling weakly despite the pain, gently chastising him for not eating enough, not sleeping.

“This isn’t a case you can solve, Sherlock.”

He wants to sleep, but he does not need to be reminded that John died alone in his.

But Sherlock’s body succumbs to the exhaustion clinging to his thin frame, and when he sinks into the darkness, John is there.

John is always there.

But when he wakes, pale sunlight illuminating the dancing dust in the air, Sherlock cannot recall what he dreamed of. It is the first time in five months, and for a moment he fights for it, ragged hands grasping for some whisper of the memory, but it’s gone and all he can see behind closed eyelids is John’s sad smile.

It is not the last time he forgets.

At first he loses a night every three weeks. Then every week. Three nights a week.

He forgets gradually, but not entirely. Sherlock knows he will dream of John until the day he too falls asleep and does not wake. He knows this the same way he knows that the work is not the same without John by his side. The same way he knows that the bed feels empty next to him. 

He knows everyone expects him to collapse in upon himself, a crumbling tower without a foundation to keep him standing. Reduced to rubble, mind laid to waste, torn apart by grief and anger. And he has collapsed, crumbled, the debris of his previous life scattered among the few people and places he still manages to hold dear. He disappeared for five months – long enough for even Mycroft to likely think him lost.

No one expects him to find the means to stand again on his own as completely as he does in the few months after Lestrade finds him shaking apart in the snow. He is not as tall or proud as he once was – nor as brash or reckless – but he is as whole as he can be considering the gaping hole at his side where John once stood. 

He does it because he can’t stand the sad smile John wears every time he closes his eyes. He does it because it’s what John did. 

He remains a consultant for the Yard, conducts experiments in the kitchen of 221B because he couldn’t bear to move elsewhere, steals body parts from Molly and annoys Mycroft whenever he can. For all appearances, he is fine.

He tells himself that he’s fine.

\---

Sherlock Holmes dies on a warm Monday in August.

There is no explosion, no crack of gunfire or squealing of tires. No final heroic act or confessions whispered with last breaths to anyone willing to listen.

Sleep claims him, and when he closes his eyes, John is there.

John is always there.


End file.
